Business leaders have been arguing for some time that artificial intelligence will emphasize workers with strong interpersonal skills.
But Sam Demers says many job seekers are “missing the mark” when it comes to effectively demonstrating the soft skills that employers are looking for most in job applications.
Demers, a career expert at job site ZipRecruiter who has helped thousands of people find jobs, said many candidates use their resumes to demonstrate how they have “basic people skills” such as communication, listening and empathy to work with others.
“Right now, that’s not enough for employers,” she says.
Instead, applicants must demonstrate what she calls “advanced” interpersonal skills. “The top three human skills that employers are looking for right now are critical thinking, judgment and decision-making, and creativity,” Demers told CNBC Make It, citing ZipRecruiter’s recent AI Employer Report, which surveyed more than 1,000 recruiters in June.
These three skills in particular “compensate for the weaknesses of AI,” she added. “At the same time that employers are increasing their AI skill requirements, they are also increasing their human skill requirements.”
Difference between basic human skills and advanced human skills
Demers says her basic soft skills include keywords such as communication, listening, collaboration and empathy, even though they don’t mean much to recruiters today.
Meanwhile, she says more advanced skills include relationship building, conflict resolution, people-first leadership, ethics and judgment, decision-making, critical thinking, creativity, storytelling, and inspirational leadership.
Basic skills show what you can do well, while advanced skills show how you can use those skills to influence people or motivate them to take action.
The best way to demonstrate these advanced skills is to itemize your work experience. Mr. DeMase follows this formula: Name the advanced human skills you used, the scope of work you used them for, and the results that impacted your team or business.
For example, to demonstrate your judgment and decision-making skills, you can create a bullet point explaining how you will use sound judgment and ethical guidelines to evaluate the output of your AI and decide which solution to use on a particular project, making the process faster and more seamless for your team.
Framing things differently, she says: “Using my advanced relationship-building skills, I developed genuine long-term partnerships with three new clients and added $120,000 in revenue.”
As she says, employers not only want to know that you have these skills, but they also want to know how to put them into practice with other humans and AI-assisted processes to improve the way you do your work.
“There is now a huge opportunity for job seekers to tell their stories and provide examples of advanced human skills,” says Demers.
